


Sunrise Overlooking the End of All Things

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:18:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a few days Dean will find it funny—fateful?— that Castiel comes to them in Maine, on the tip of the country where it juts into the Atlantic, the last spit of land before the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunrise Overlooking the End of All Things

**I.**

In a few days Dean will find it funny—fateful?— that Castiel comes to them in Maine, on the tip of the country where it juts into the Atlantic, the last spit of land before the sea. They can hear the water from their motel room on its concrete block, with everything cracked outside and weeds pulling up through the pavements, the yellow buffers of the near-empty parking lot.

The brothers are just back from dinner in a restaurant where the rain left oily-black slicks of dusk on their booth window, and dazzled the headlights of passing cars into a million myriad dampened sparks. Both of them noticed it, the play of dew and glow, but neither mentioned it, knowing the unspoken rule that the little things they love about the highway world they live in are to be treasured silently.

The angel is waiting for them inside, once they shoulder open the creaking door and step into the same humid summer air that pillows down over the world outside, the heavy fug of rain. It’s dark. Dean stumbles for the lamp as Sam says, “Hey, Cas.”

“Hello.”

The lamp comes on and slashes a fuzzy arc of gold against the textured walls, not nearly enough to illuminate the entire room. Cas stands in the corner and the light doesn’t quite reach him, but plays beneath his eyes and draws out shadows. His half-moon face looks like a skull.

“What’s up?” says Dean. He claps the angel on the shoulder as he passes him.

Cas doesn’t say anything but sucks his lower lip between his teeth. Sam looks at him. The weight of the room shifts, like the edge of Maine is sliding into the sea and taking them with it, or the black oily rain has found its way into the piping and the ceiling tiles and any minute will burst down and drench them in its polluted slick.

“Cas?” says Dean, turning to him, an olive-green smudged silhouette against the frosted blinds on the window.

“I have bad news,” Cas says, a croak. Something in the woodwork groans and pops and Sam’s eyes flick up, and down. “Well—I have news. I have.” He draws himself up by the top of his spine as much as he can. “Something’s happened.”

The brothers fidget inside the sudden ribcage of concern. They wait.

“I thought you should know,” says Cas.

“Know what?” Dean asks. “Cas?”

“I heard a whisper upstairs,” Cas says weakly. He avoids their eyes now, them from their black shapes to the safer dusk-ooze of the window and the rain. “At home, in Heaven. Something tells me it’s not a rumour. I thought you should know.”

“Cas.”

The angel toys with the corner of the nightstand, his fingertips rubbing and pushing against it as if to wear down the edge.

“No one is talking about it. Everything’s very quiet.” He sighs in a hasty sort of way. “I saw—in one of your motel rooms once I saw a cartoon while I was waiting for one of you or something like that, and in the cartoon there was a red button, and when it was pushed the entire world exploded in a puff of smoke—”

“Cas.” Sam stands up out of his seat, and looks at him.

The lamp catches the hollows of Castiel’s face, punching the shadows in like cut paper. He gnaws at his lip and gnaws and gnaws. “They found the red button,” he says, “and so many of them are tired, and they’re going to push it. The angels are going to push it. The failsafe, the emergency off-switch.”

The brothers stare at him in his corner of gold and dark. “What exactly does that mean?” Dean says, trying to convince himself that his voice isn’t shaking, because he thinks he already knows, and his bones don’t understand what to do about it.

“It means the universe is going to end,” says Castiel, at the same moment that they realise it fully, where it settles into their brains, a horrible little tadpole burrowing into the murk. “We have roughly a week before everything ceases to be.”

–

**II.**

When they leave their room by the sea, Castiel comes with them. They abandon its greenish corners and incompetent lamp under the cover of bleak morning and they move, all of them, like sluggish machines, all their joints rotating stiffly and without passion. The road parts for them, an apathetic asphalt Red Sea, and they don’t drive far or with much conversation, but stop in the middle of the state before the sun gets halfway into the sky, too dumbstruck and thoughtbound to speak or comprehend very much of the world.

Cas murmurs that he doesn’t think he’s going home again. He says that if it’s true, if they really only do have seven days until the entirety of creation shunts off into oblivion, he doesn’t want to be in Heaven. He wants to be with them. Sam and Dean, in their own way, are glad. They don’t say anything about the fear they both feel in the deep chambers of their hearts, but they know that the angel’s presence soothes it, if only a little.

Seven days to live and to act. They never thought it’d feel so final and inevitable, knowing the day of their own demise.

“What are we going to do?” Sam asks. His voice cuts through the silence like a shard of glass, piercing his companions. It’s something they do have to think about.

“We could try to stop it,” Castiel says.

They sit in the idea for a very long time in the nameless, faceless room they’ve landed in, sitting loose-limbed in its beige-cream-white enclosure, the muffled colour that blocks out the rest of the outside, eats up the pale sun. Dean looks at the weak orb in the sky and realises abruptly that, in all likelihood, it’s making one of its final descents.

Sam thinks about it. Running all over the country, grinding the wheels of the Impala into so much rubber dust, chasing lead after lead. Making yet another grand few decisions to cut off the cartwheel of the End and break its legs and keep it down for another year or two or three. The same formula, the same exhaustion, the same story they’ve been telling all this time. He wonders how long they’ll be able to keep this up, this business of saving a world that never gives them any thanks for its deliverance.

Castiel thinks, mostly, of home, and the grave faces of his siblings. He’s seized with an urge to get up and put his arms around the brothers and bury his face in their shoulders, but he doesn’t. So the hours pass in unmoving stillness, all of them glassy-eyed, thinking, thinking, letting migraines tick over and out through their skulls.

The sun sets and night comes and they are still in western Maine and have made no decisions. Night falls and falls, like the black wings of some rebel creature, and rain washes over and is quickly gone. Sam begins to watch the clock and realises with an inkling of terror that with every motion of its hands, time is moving away, and that they are sliding down the slope. Tuesday the 15th, Cas has said. On Tuesday the 15th the angels will shut down the universe. They have seven days.

Sam watches and watches until the face of the clock makes the imperceptible leap from night to morning and watches until the small hours, and wishes he could sleep and knows he won’t be able to, regardless of how hard he tries.

Dean makes his best attempt to arrive at a conclusion. A headache is pounding at his skull. They should all be sleeping at this time of night; they’ve all done nothing but drive a little and sit a lot and fester for hours. He’s used to planning; there have been no plans. Once the solution would have been obvious and clear: _fight back, and fight back with all you’ve got_ , but now that seems like such a tiring thing to do, such a worthless thing to try.

Dean finds it a little funny—fateful?—that Cas came to them on the tip of Maine, on the edge of the world.

He watches Sam watch the clock. He watches Castiel’s body go concave in his chair, his white hands loose in his lap. Finally he takes a deep breath, but not as deep as he would have liked.

He says, “Let’s just let it happen.”

They look at him, the two faces he loves most in the world. There’s no surprise or rebuttal or contention in them. Dean thinks he sees something akin to relief, in all honesty, a sort of falling of their eyes. Wind blows and rattles the door knocker.

“Let’s just let it end,” he says, and seems to let go of an enormous weight as he does, something near-tangible that clouds in the air around his mouth like breath and then dissipates: responsibility, perhaps, or empathy, or energy. Dean sags and pulls at his mouth and sighs. He closes his eyes. He’s so weary. “Just—let them do it.”

Cas says, “Dean.”

“I’m tired, man,” Dean says, looking at him with dull eyes. “I’m just so damn tired.”

He looks at Sam, and Sam looks away.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Dean says. It comes out hoarse. “I just want to sleep. I.”

He drops off and tilts forward and his head hangs down and his hands hang down between his knees.

He knows (in the way that he knows) that they agree in their quiet way, that they won’t admit it, but they feel the same, and they do. They look at him and then away from him, back to clocks and empty walls, and feel their own weights pulling off their sternums and scattering like atoms, dust mites.

Sam thinks that maybe he should be writing this down, getting out a notebook and a pen and keeping track so that everyone in the world will know that at 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, Dean Winchester decided to stop fighting the course of fate, but then he remembers that soon there will be no more Tuesdays and no more three-o’clocks in the morning and no more notebooks or, for that matter, people on a planet to read words and understand, so he doesn’t write it down. Instead he watches the minute pass, the tiny hand clicking over, until it’s gone and can’t be grasped anymore, and a new minute is starting, and with it a whole new universe in which his brother is not a warrior but a tired young man in the middle of his life.

Sam attempts to imagine what oblivion will be like before he remembers that it won’t be like anything. Nothing will _be_.

–

**III.**

They push the beds together as close as they will go and sleep as the sun rises, all three uneasy. For an hour or so Cas remains awake, watching the brothers fight for rest.

He notices that they turn by instinct to face one another, that their arms fall over the edges of the mattresses, near enough to almost let their fingers brush. Cas almost wishes they would, that they touch while they can. He thinks about the infinite blackness coming in and feels a chill run down his borrowed bones; he gets up and sits down, tentative, on the edge of Dean’s bed, and his hand hovers over the hunter’s restless body but doesn’t come down.

He lies down and covers his mouth with his hands and closes his eyes.

The brothers wake after a while without having really slept and Dean looks at the sun, the sun making one of its last ascents, and he says, “I want to drive.”

“Drive where?” Sam says. “Where is there to drive?”

“We’ve never seen the Grand Canyon,” Dean says quietly. “And soon—soon there won’t be a Grand Canyon, and—”

He swallows, reaches over to pull open the blinds and the watery afternoon comes in, the horizon, all the levels and layers of America’s western edges.

“I want to see it,” he says. “We’ve always wanted to see it. It was—something we always wanted to do.”

He’s a downward-weighted shape, a collapsing house, the crumbling of a bridge. A world ending. Sam wants desperately to hold him up before he falls apart but he lingers closer to Cas instead, unsure if he has permission to touch anyone. Three pillars that could hold the universe up for another few years before another Armageddon comes along, but they’re hammering themselves down instead.

“So let’s do it,” Dean says, turning. “If we’re going to let this happen, I want to see the Grand Canyon.”

His Adam’s apple rises and falls and he looks away at the pebbled carpet and the edge of the dinette table and thinks, _six days left._

“I want,” he says, “I want to sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon, with you—Sammy, with you and Cas, and I want to—I want to be with you when it ends.”

Sam says, “Dean,” almost plaintive, because _no,_ he doesn’t want to see Dean give up like this. He doesn’t want to make last-ditch plans. He doesn’t want to think about the infinite dark slamming in, even though he knows they can’t do anything to stop it; they’ve already said the words of surrender and now they’re irretrievable. Now even any attempt would surely fail.

Sam is standing in a motel room in Maine and Castiel hasn’t said anything in hours and Dean wants to see the Grand Canyon and sit on the edge of the great abyss and wait with his brothers for the sun to go out.

Funny—fateful?—that they began on the tip of Maine, with the whole country laid out behind them. One final careening run towards a split in the Earth, the last great corner of the States, the final inch, and something will have been completed.

Sam thinks of what they could possibly do otherwise, if there is anything else to be done besides drive and be together and as soon as he thinks this he knows: there is nothing else to be done. There is nothing better to do at the end of the world than be with the people he loves, with the sad bewildered bodies that occupy the room with him.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

They drive to Connecticut and Cas looks out the window of the back seat at the world passing by and knows that no one he sees on the street understands that they don’t have anyone to save them this time. Eventually he has to look away.

–

**IV.**

“What’ll it be like?” Dean asks. They’ve parked on the edge of a hill to watch the stars wheel and try, perhaps, to memorise the map of the heavens before it goes quiet. Dean tries to relish the beer in his hand, the warmth of Sam and Cas on either side of him on the hood of the car. He wonders if, after their last decision to succumb to surrender comes to fruition, anything will be left of him that will have the capacity to remember. He wonders—and swallows back tears, frightening himself—if the love he has for them will do anything to impede the roar of the end.

“It’ll be like nothing,” Cas says, tipping his head back. “The ceasing of everything. Hell, Heaven, humanity…angels, gods.”

“Will it hurt?” Sam asks meekly. They look at him and he pulls his face away and stares up at the moon.

“No.”

Cas takes them in, the bendings of their bodies, and is struck enormously with how much he loves them, and how much he doesn’t want to lose them, and how much he can’t do anything to save them, not this time.

–

**V.**

Sam has a panic attack. Dean and Castiel wake up to see him toppled out of bed, slumped in the corner between the mattress and the nightstand. His eyes are wide and he’s having trouble breathing, and he’s sucking air in through his nose and exhaling none of it. He’s shaking, prodding and pressing at his chest as if he’s trying to jump-start a generator to get his lungs working again, as if, like any other machine he’s ever encountered, enough pressure in the right place will spark it to life again, but it isn’t working.

Dean and Cas crouch down. Their hands are ghosts flickering around Sam’s face. Dean says, “Breathe, Sammy,” and Cas murmurs something unintelligible, and grasps one of Sam’s fingers in his fist, just one, pulls it close to his chest. Sam feels the angel’s heart leap under his hand and jerks like a frightened horse and expels a rush of air.

“I’m scared,” he says, or wails, a kind of sound they’ve never heard from him. It frightens them. It seems to burst a dam inside him and a torrential waterfall of words pours out of his mouth from between his clattering teeth, and with them tears and great heavy sobs that burn in his chest and his throat. He grabs at their bodies. “I’m scared, I’m—”

“It’s just dying, Sammy,” says Dean, past a lump of something acrid in his esophagus. He can’t believe he’s saying it. “It’s just dying. We’ve done it a million times before.”

Sam shakes his head, wild, his whole body bowing forward into a shape like a C, hyperventilating. Cas takes hold of his entire arm and presses his forehead into Sam’s shoulder.

“No, no,” Sam says, scrabbling at his face. His fingers come away wet and caught tears slide down his fingers like dew on the stems of roses, like Dean and Castiel are somehow a trellis breaking under his weight. He wheels them off, collapses in on himself. “No, it’s not, it’s different, it’s—when we die there’s Heaven or Hell and there’s a place after things end, and we—we know, we know—but after this it’s just nothing, we’ll be nothing, we won’t ever have been anything. It’ll be so black and we’ll be so alone—”

“We won’t be anything,” says Castiel. His breath leaves hot little blooms on Sam’s skin. “Sam, we won’t be anything at all.”

“Exactly,” Sam whispers, with his wide eyes fixed on Cas, and his face breaks down, crumples like paper. He heaves himself into sobbing and curls up away from them, making himself very small in the corner between the mattress and the nightstand, making himself so small he imagines he could squeeze himself right out of the world before the lights go out, before he has to know what the darkness is like.

Dean and Cas look at one another, and Dean touches Castiel’s arm with the tips of his fingers. They clutch and grip, tightening, and slide, hold the angel’s wrist. Sam covers his face with his hands.

–

**VI.**

They find themselves in Lawrence and have to wonder if it’s fate. Dean sees the green sign and slows, and then picks up again, his mouth tight, and turns the wheel in a daze down roads he hardly remembers. Sam and Cas know in their bones what he’s doing and don’t have the heart to protest. Sam looks at the angel in the side mirror. He looks sad, and tired.

The house is still there as they knew it would be, with a _For Sale_ sign in the front yard, and the windows look empty, though a car sits in the drive. They get out of the Impala in silence and look at it, the jut of its roof into the cloudy sky, piercing the white sun.

“We can’t be here, Dean,” Sam says, not because of any law or legality or danger but because he can’t bear it, standing in front of the parts of his childhood he doesn’t remember, two days from the end of everything.

“Dean,” says Cas, “we should—we should keep driving.” His wings feel heavy where they’re hidden in the ether, weighed down with absence from home.

“Just give me a minute,” Dean says.

They watch him go up to the front door, slowly, as if moving through deep water or a dream. He stands on the front steps with his hand raised against the wood. Cas thinks he’s about to knock, but he only stands there, resting his forehead on the knocker, and seems to shrink, to hold himself up only by sheer force of will, knowing horribly that he was born for this house, that his mother died in this house, that he held his brother in his arms and ran from its front hall. That soon this house will not be, and all its meaning and all the things that had started here will have not been, will have become nothingness.

That he’s going to die, so far from the first thing that had ever been home.

His shoulders begin to shake.

–

**VII.**

Unabashedly they sleep all together on the last night of the world, in the queen bed in a motel, having seen the Great Sand Dunes, the Rockies, the mountains and the storm coming in over the mountains, the cabins set far back from the dim highways. (Cas looked back out the window most the drive, the final drive, looking back at all the miles they’ll never travel again, the asphalt they’ve eaten up beneath their wheels so many hundreds of times. They are never going back. None of them are ever going back.)

Sam doesn’t cry, but Cas does—he gets up in the middle of the night to sit at the dinette and bow his head against the table and weep. He feels the brothers’ arms come down around him and hold him, hold him more tightly than they ever have, their faces pressed against the sides of his head, all their bodies trembling, trembling like grass before the onslaught of the storm.

–

**VIII.**

The last leg of the journey begins before the final sun is up and no one speaks.

It’s Tuesday the 15th, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon greets them, painted in hazy watercolours in the lengthening end of night, blue and grey and desert black jutting up and falling out and down. They park the Impala on a lonely stretch where they are entirely alone, among scrub brush and cactus, and the sounds of their footsteps echo for what seems like an eternity.

They can’t believe they’ve had so little time to come to terms with all of this. A week to prepare themselves for the end of the world, and they’re not prepared, not really, but what else is there to do? What else is there to do now? It’s too late for anything else.

They keep close together, almost afraid to lose sight of each other even for the instant it takes to round the Impala. When the doors slam shut it’s with the sweet finality of a mausoleum closing forever. Dean lets his hand drag across her hood one last time, his best and most faithful home, looking out over the rift of the Earth.

They make their way to the edge and peer over at the way the stone falls down into the thin string of the Colorado River, the entire history of the world etched in rock and sediment, every layer and strata, everything that has ever happened.

Sam breathes; Dean breathes and his breath stutters in his throat. Cas reaches out to clutch his sleeve.

They sit down on the edge, legs dangling, and a calm and silence falls, a peace that surprises all of them once they’ve reached it. Like soldiers they look out, towards the horizon, as if standing to attention to some unheard order.

They know there isn’t long to wait.

Sam wonders if it will be like the lights in a grocery store, shutting off one by one, cutting the universe away by pieces, if it will march towards them like so many curtains falling down and down.

“The sun,” Sam whispers.

The frosted sugar of sunrise is listing up over the canyon, scattering colour, pinks and purples and soft blues, oranges and golds, unfolding and laying itself out against the desert flats, seeping down into the rivets of the canyon’s walls, the paint of day, and for a moment—just a moment—they forget: there is only the sun, pushing up into the sky as if to assure them that nothing is going to end, pulling up one last enormous beauty for them in their little corner of the country, all together, all together at the end of the universe, one last dream fulfilled.

Dean hears Sam gasp as if overwhelmed with it, and he knows it won’t be long, it won’t be long—he’s crying, now, and reaches out for his brother, finds his hand and wraps his own around it tight, clutches so hard he feels the bones shift, and reaches out for Cas and their arms wind around one another and they bend into him, hiding their faces in his shoulders, shivering in the morning cold of the vast painted desert and the canyon beneath their bodies, but Dean looks out.

Dean looks out at the world and holds them and the tears drift down his face. He loves them. He loves them so much he can hardly bear it, and they’re here. He realises, too late, that he is so, so happy that this has happened, that they are here.

“It’s so beautiful,” he whispers, and he breathes and he bows his head and he holds them and he loves them. He loves them. He loves--


End file.
